After dinner we sate out in front of the little inn for a time with our coffee. There was a good deal of coming and going, a tremendous clattering about of children in little wooden _sabots_, and much good-natured 'chaff' between the people of the inn, who came out to take the air after their day's work, and the passers-by. There seems to be little in the peasants here of that positive _morgue_, not to say arrogance, which marks the demeanour of their class in the western parts of France. There are regions in Brittany where the carriage of the peasants towards the 'bourgeois' gives reality and zest to the old story of the _ci-devant_ noble who called a particularly insolent varlet to order in the days of the first Revolution by saying to him: 'Nay, friend, you will be good enough to remember that we are living in a republic, and that I am your equal!' There was the most perfect civility and amiableness even in the interchange of not very delicate pleasantries between the people at Coucy. 'Don't go too near the butcher's shop!' called out one of the ostlers to a man with whom he had been talking as the latter drove off in his cart. 'Ah! you won't eat me, if I do,' the other replied; 'it would cost you too much!' An old farmer who sate sipping his _petit verre_ near me, explained to me that the man was a resident of Barisis, a little village not very far off, the dwellers in which from time immemorial have been known as 'the pigs of Barisis.' 'Try and pick up a husband on the way,' another of the stable lads called out after a pretty girl who paused with a companion, as she went by the place, to chat with him--'try and pick up a husband on the way and we'll keep the wedding feast here!' 'Ah bah!' the damsel rejoined in a merry voice, 'more marryers come your way than ours. Tie up the first one that comes and keep him for me!' This quickness to catch and return the ball certainly shows a greater natural or acquired alertness of mind among these Picard peasants than is commonly found in people of the same condition in rural England. The country all the way from Coucy to Laon is one continuous garden, and Laon itself is pre-eminently a city set on a hill. The Chateau de Coucy stands upon its pinnacle of rock, like a knight in armour, with folded arms, looking loftily down upon the world, conscious of his strength, and calmly awaiting attack. The fortress-city of Laon, a fortress from the earliest Roman days, looks out from the promontory on which it stands, over the wide expanse of plain beyond and around it, like an advanced sentinel, watchful and alert.